From Trees To Landscapes

I finished out February with doing negative space trees.  This is one of the last ones.  The overall goal was just to paint. Check. The side goal was to explore different paint strokes. That one still needs a lot of work, since all of them turned out remarkably the same. 

I still want to keep things simple.  My follow up project is to work on outdoors scenes from photos.  Since I don’t want to rush, I’m shooting for finishing 10 paintings.

This was the first one and it’s a revisit of a painting I tried awhile ago using a photo that I liked. I like the photo and I also thought it would be a challenge with getting different shades of green for the different parts.

While I can’t say that I like the finished result, I am glad that I finished it. I also focused on getting a clear foreground, middle ground and background. Also from the time I stopped after day 2 to finishing it on day 3, the green part of the tree looks more like it belongs to one tree. Mid-way through, it had this bizarre abstract quality and didn’t read as a single object or as being part of a tree.

Some things to work on are figuring out a way to make the lighter areas of the tree look better and truer to their actual size and getting the peak through color of the sky more distinct from the light colors of the tree. 

Snow In The Forecast

With the weather forecast showing up to 5 inches of snow tomorrow, it was time to get these ready for another year.

I should have taken a before picture, since these were in sad, sad shape. Actually, they are still in rather sad shape. The fluffy stuff to keep your feet warm is mostly gone and the rest of the insides are quite worn. At least they look fabulous on the outside!!

I Have A Secret

This is unrelated to painting. I have a secret. There are plants growing in my basement.

Last week when we had snow, sleet, drizzle, hail and rain when I felt annoyed by the weather, I went down to look at my plants. Here are two thyme plants, one tiny oregano plant, and one sage plant, which I started awhile back from seed. In the back corner, you can see an orange butterfly weed.

I have cut way back, so I am starting less plants and enjoy it much more. Since I gave up one of my community garden plot in the fall and the other one several years ago, I have much less space to grow things, since I have a small yard and much of it is shady. I am hoping this means I will be growing less, but enjoying more, plus enjoying going to the farmer's market.

This year, I only started 9 tomato plants and will probably plant 5 of them. All of them germinated on the two snowy days last week! It made me very happy to go down and see new, little plants push up out of the soil.

Snow, Snow, and More Snow

Somewhere in this morning’s newspaper, it mentioned that we’ve gotten 22 inches of snow so far in February. Let me repeat/rephrase that......Before counting today’s snowstorm, it’s snowed 22 inches of snow in February and it’s only the 20th of February.  Early in the month, I kept imagining a giant kitchen sink in the sky.  One faucet in the sink was to turn on extreme cold or and the other was for  for lots of snow and one of the faucets had to be turned on at all times.  It isn’t as cold now, but someone seems to have left the snow faucet turned all the way up.

That brings me to this morning.  I shoveled around 3 inches of snow before heading off to work at a client.  The drive was one of the worst I’ve encountered for awhile, mostly, because visibility was terrible.  I am in the middle of the city.  I can’t imagine what it was like outside of the city.  Driving home in the early afternoon was much better.  However when I got home, 6 more inches of snow was waiting for me.  

While I still absolutely love the snow and can’t help but smile when it’s snowing, it’s getting hard to shovel.  The piles are so high and I’m running out of places to put the snow.  Also, I really, really wish we would have gotten some of this in December and early January, since it was brown and ugly for most of that time.  

My partner-in-crime and snow-shoveling has been away at a conference in Phoenix the last week, so I have been a solo-shoveler.  He returns tomorrow. 

Earlier in the month, I was painting snow scenes.  I decided to take a break from that.  This is an acquarium scene from the Minnesota Zoo.  The source picture is from several years ago. 

#298 - A Painting With No Snow - 8" x 10" - paper

I rather like how the pink coral/mushroom-looking things turned out.